Phil Estes leads by example. When Estes, the head football coach, asks
his players to get involved in community service, he’s not just
mouthing clichés. He practices what he preaches. During this last
off-season, for example, he organized the “Angry Bears” bike ride.
Estes, along with his wife Kate, defensive coordinator Mike Kelleher,
and Kelleher’s wife, Betsy, became the Angry Bears cycling in the Des
Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. The Brown
coaches and spouses were in it to raise money for cancer research as a
way of supporting football alumnus Bill Perry ’88 as he battles thyroid
cancer.

Courtesy Phil Estes

Kate Estes, Betsey Kelleher, Mike Kelleher, and Phil Estes at the end
of the Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. They rode to support Bill
Perry '88, who is battling thyroid cancer.

It’s no surprise, then, that Estes’s players are involved in everything
from the Bench Press for Cancer to the Be the Match Bone Marrow Donor
Registry Drive. Through the bone marrow drive, which the team has
hosted for the past three years, players have helped register about 600
potential marrow donors in the National Marrow Donor Program’s Be the
Match Registry. For many patients with diseases such as leukemia, a
bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor is often their last
hope.

Two Brown players, including safety Matthew Shannon ’14, recently
learned they were potential matches. After being notified in February,
Shannon underwent further testing to determine if he was the best match
for the recipient. The odds of being a perfect genetic match are 80,000
to 1.

This spring, a week before finals, Shannon got the call. He was a perfect match.

“Time stood still for a second,” Shannon says. “I was hoping for the
phone call. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help.”

After completing his finals, Shannon flew home to Ohio for more
physicals and blood work. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., to
undergo surgery to remove marrow from his pelvis. By early June he was
back home recovering.

“Any pain or sacrifice that I made in this process is nothing
compared to what [the patient] is going through,” Shannon says. “It was
definitely worth it.”

Shannon knows very little about the person who was implanted with
his marrow, not even his exact disease. But six weeks after the
patient’s procedure, Shannon learned he was out of the hospital and
doing well. Shannon says he may get another update in late November or
December, and after a year he may be able to meet the recipient
face-to-face. “That would be pretty special,” he says.

Estes, who hails from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, entered a lottery to get
into the Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, which covers 471.1 miles over
seven days.

While Estes was preparing for the ride, he learned of Perry’s disease
and recognized the opportunity to help. After he talked with the Perry
family, the Angry Bears team was born, and the riders had found their
purpose.

“Everything fell into place like this was supposed to happen,” Estes
says. “If we can bring awareness to thyroid cancer and at the same time
make people aware of what Billy and his family are going through, and
how courageous and strong he is, I think it is a win-win for everyone.”

Courtesy Brown Sports

Bone
marrow donor Matthew Shannon '14 overcame 80,000-to-one odds to become
a match for a cancer patient in desperate need of a transplant.

The Angry Bears raised more than $30,000 for Boston’s Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute. The football team has also raised more than $80,000
for the American Cancer Society over the past six years with its Bench
Press for Cancer fund-raiser, which now also includes athletes from
other Brown teams. Coach Estes participates and is challenged to keep
up with his players by alumni donors.

Football associate head coach Abbott Burrell and offensive
coordinator Frank Sheehan have also volunteered their time for the past
five years at the Lauren’s First and Goal Football Camp at Lafayette
College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Last year, the camp raised $80,000 for
pediatric brain tumor research.

Throughout the year, the team is also involved with a special
education class at the Vartan Gregorian Elementary School in
Providence. In addition, players such as Michael Yules ’14 have taken
on the responsibility of becoming a Big Brother and mentoring an
at-risk child.
While the goal of much of the team’s community service is to raise
awareness about certain illnesses, some of it is simply about helping
out an individual. This spring, after former assistant coach Paul
Gorham, a former Estes teammate at the University of New Hampshire,
contracted idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, he was airlifted to the
Cleveland Clinic. While Gorham underwent treatment, Estes organized a
calendar so that someone—a friend, relative, or fellow coach—would
visit him at the clinic every day. Gorham underwent a double lung
transplant and both his legs were amputated below the knee. In
mid-July, Estes, Kelleher, and assistant coach Neil McGrath flew to
Cleveland and rented an RV so they could drive Gorham back to his home
in Connecticut.

“Our kids do a lot of different things that they think about and create
on their own,” Estes says, “but it has always been a part of our
football team to want to give back, or to ‘give forward,’ as we say, so
they take that to heart as a team and as individuals.”

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The Brown Alumni Magazine is published bimonthly, in print since 1900.